A Bumper Crop of Problems

Punished on all sides, farmers reap nothing but trouble

Jozef Prystupa, who raises chickens in Poland's northern district of Borkowo, sold almost 80,000 broilers to the state in 1981. Last year, thanks to a grain shortage caused by U.S. sanctions against his homeland, he shipped none. Likewise rendered fodderless, Jerzy Karczmarczyk was first reduced to keeping pigs in his chicken house and is now girding himself for an anticipated tax crunch: the government has already assessed one of his acquaintances more than $250,000 in retroactive tax payments for allegedly producing more than he declared. Yet boycotts from abroad and crackdowns at home are only part of the Polish farmer's woes this year. Last spring the expected profits from a long-overdue bumper crop of potatoes were nibbled away by an invasion of Colorado beetles; then a lingering summer dry spell withered some crops before they could be harvested. Warns Jan Kiedrowski, who switched from cattle raising to the more profitable line of cabbage growing: "If this keeps up, there's going to be serious hunger in Poland in the next few years."

Prystupa, Karczmarczyk and Kiedrowski are, ironically, among the most prosperous of the nation's 4 million private farmers, members of a select group who were chosen by the government to meet with the participants in a TIME Newstour to Eastern Europe in October 1981. At that time, Rural Solidarity was in full bloom, state subsidies were pumping up already hefty profits, and agricultural machinery and grain from the West were flooding in at record rates. Less than two months after the TIME visit, the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law. Solidarity was banned, U.S. sanctions went into effect, and the agricultural boom died. Within a year, Poland's poultry production plummeted by 66%. The government also cut back subsidies to collective farms, effectively presenting them with a "profit or perish" ultimatum. Most recently there have been hints that the Jaruzelski regime will levy heavier property taxes and new retroactive taxes on private farmers. Since the level of those taxes may be based on productivity, self-employed farmers, who account for 75% of the nation's food production, see every reason to curtail their output; some indeed have already taken to slaughtering pigs and cattle. Thus a nation in which food shortages triggered rioting in 1956 is again on the brink of agricultural crisis.

"When I was a student," says Kiedrowski, "I heard how everything [in farming] goes smoothly. All you have to do is follow nature. It's not true. Nowadays you have to be a businessman to run a farm." Disenchantment has also come for Stanislaw Szur, a former engineering student who took over a 63-acre farm from his father-in-law last year. "It's no fun to run a farm now. Both my wife and I get up at 5 a.m. and work until 10 p.m. I go to milk the cows, and she goes to town to stand in line at the shops." At that, Szur is luckier than most. Friends with powerful connections helped him get a corn shucker; he knows of 80 other farmers who are on the waiting list for those machines in a region that is to receive only four during the next two years.